Bess Roth

Bess Roth’s resourcefulness holds her family together as political pressure makes ordinary domestic life precarious. Once an office secretary and a rising PTA leader, she becomes both the household’s careful planner and its most direct advocate for protecting the people within it. Her work is practical—earning and saving money, keeping the family fed, making calls, arranging help—but it also measures how far the Roths’ world has changed: the home she once made secure can no longer be assumed safe simply because it is in America.

Identity and Background

Bess is thirty-six when Charles A. Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination in June 1940. Her husband, Herman Roth, is an insurance agent earning a little under fifty dollars a week; the family lives with their sons, Sandy Roth and Philip Roth, in a small second-floor flat in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood. Bess had wanted to attend teachers’ college, but the expense prevented it. After high school she worked as an office secretary and then used the money Herman brought home each Friday to keep the family’s household running efficiently through the Great Depression.

Her abilities extend beyond the home. After marrying and moving from Elizabeth to Newark’s Jewish neighborhood, she gains the confidence to take on leadership in the local PTA. She becomes a grade mother, vice president responsible for establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and eventually PTA president. She also helps advance community projects: after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, she proposes an annual March of Dimes dance on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday, and Newark schools adopt the idea. By 1939 she is supporting a young social studies teacher’s effort to bring visual education into Chancellor Avenue School classrooms. These roles give her public standing and a sense of belonging that she fears losing if the family moves.

Belonging, Work, and the Threat of Displacement

When Herman is offered a promotion that would require the family to move to Union, Bess recognizes that a larger house would not necessarily mean a freer life. Looking at the residential streets, she imagines her family becoming conspicuous as the Jews in a predominantly Christian neighborhood. Her concern reaches back to her own childhood in Elizabeth, where she was raised above her immigrant father’s grocery store in a town dominated by Irish working-class politics and parish life. She had not described herself as having been singled out for mistreatment there, but Newark had given her opportunities and confidence she did not want her sons to lose. In Union, she fears, Sandy and Philip might inherit the same outsider status she remembers from her youth.

Herman turns down the promotion and the family stays in Newark. When he explains his decision, Bess immediately blames herself, even though he tells her the choice is his. Later, as Sandy becomes involved with the Office of American Absorption and Aunt Evelyn’s political circle, Bess takes a job selling dresses at Hahne’s. She tells the boys that her wages will help cover the increased household expenses following Alvin Roth’s return. In private, however, she sends the paychecks to a Montreal bank account. She is preparing for the possibility that the family may have to flee and begin again in Canada—a contingency she does not yet discuss openly with her children.

Care as Practical Action

Bess’s care for her family is expressed through precise, repeated acts. When news arrives that Alvin has been wounded while serving with the Canadian commandos, she sits down with Herman after dinner to compose a letter to him. She writes on the family’s monogrammed stationery, speaking each sentence aloud so that Herman can suggest changes. Later, when she learns that Alvin has lost a leg, she tells Sandy the news only after gathering herself to keep from crying. Her efforts to manage the delivery of painful news do not make the loss less serious; they give the family a way to face it together.

When Herman visits Alvin in a Montreal hospital, Bess prepares his breakfast, fills his thermos, and packs three paper bags of food, marking them for lunch, a snack, and dinner. After Alvin returns home, she goes shopping despite her growing fear of being out on the streets. With police patrolling Newark and members of the Jewish community also on watch, she hurries between the house and Chancellor Avenue to gather ingredients for the meal she knows he likes: chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing and walnuts, and latkes. Domestic work here is not separate from the political crisis. It is how she welcomes home a wounded relative while trying to restore a measure of family routine.

Her attention also reaches beyond her household. When Seldon Wishnow calls from Danville, Kentucky, frightened and alone after his mother has gone missing, Bess takes charge of finding him help. She consults a map, places a long-distance person-to-person call, and asks the operator to notify her when the three minutes are up. She speaks with Seldon and then persuades Mr. Mawhinney, a churchgoing farmer she has never met, to go to the boy. She explains that Seldon has already suffered the loss of his father and now does not know where his mother is. She also assures the Mawhinneys that Herman is prepared to drive to Kentucky and bring the child back to Newark if necessary. Before ending the call, she gives Seldon concrete instructions about packing a toothbrush, pajamas, underwear, clean socks, warm clothes, and a cap. Her response turns a distant emergency into a sequence of doable steps.

Family Conflict and Political Pressure

Bess tries to keep Sandy from being drawn further into Aunt Evelyn’s political activities. After he is selected as a recruiter for the Office of American Absorption, she approaches him privately, offering to listen and to discuss why Herman opposes his proposed trip to the White House. She suggests that Aunt Evelyn is overexcited and may have misjudged the situation. Sandy responds coldly, and the disagreement sharpens into an open family conflict. When he defies Herman, Bess abruptly breaks with her customary restraint: she strikes Sandy and insists that he obey his father. Her action is not presented as her ordinary way of parenting, but as a desperate attempt to stop her son from confusing political favor with safety.

As the family’s danger grows, Bess argues that they should go to Canada. Herman refuses to regard it as a solution and insists that he will not run from his country. Bess counters that the country has ceased to feel like theirs. The conflict exposes a painful difference in how the couple understands responsibility: Herman resists both unjust government policy and flight, while Bess gives priority to getting the family somewhere it may be safer. Neither response comes easily. At an ice-cream outing, after several Jewish families have disappeared under the relocation program, she tells Herman that Lindbergh is teaching them what it means to be Jews and that they may only have thought of themselves as Americans. Herman rejects that conclusion and insists that Jewish Americans belong in the country. Their exchange leaves the disagreement unresolved, but makes clear that Bess’s fear is no longer merely a private worry.

Rupture, Crisis, and Narrative Role

Bess’s relationship with Aunt Evelyn, her sister, reaches a breaking point when Evelyn arrives at the Roth home asking to be hidden. Bess refuses. She reminds her that the Roths are afraid and in danger too, and that Evelyn has a house, money, and servants while the family has none of those protections. She orders Evelyn to leave rather than expose the household to further risk. Afterward, Bess breaks down in the kitchen. The scene reveals both the force and the cost of the practical decisions she has been making: she can act decisively for her family, but she cannot make the surrounding danger manageable simply by organizing it.

When she learns of Selma Wishnow’s death and the arrest of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bess asks how such events can be happening. She connects the catastrophe not only to Lindbergh’s disappearance but to his having entered public life in the first place. Her distress is inseparable from the uncertainty over where Herman and Sandy are as the country’s crisis deepens. The narrative repeatedly shows Bess attempting to preserve order—through work, food, letters, phone calls, and plans for escape—while the conditions that make those acts necessary keep worsening. Her character is therefore not defined by a single political position or by domestic competence alone. She is a mother and civic participant whose practical care becomes a form of resistance, and whose fear makes visible the human cost of a country in which ordinary belonging can no longer be trusted.